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Lauren Carter knows the end of the world as we know it won’t be pretty, with Hollywood stars walking around looking slightly scruffy, or tribes of healthy, happy locavores growing their own veggies and respecting the earth. Instead, it’s more likely to be the kind of thing described in Swarm: a gradual but dramatic downgrade in our standards of living that will leave us all (or at least the 99 per cent) cold, sick, and hungry.

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The time is the future, sometime after peak oil and an economic meltdown have taken civilization back to the Stone Age: a world without Wi-Fi or even electricity and running water. People don’t often bathe, their clothes fall apart, and they eat rotten food and get sick and die. In chapters that alternate between flashbacks to life in the “City” and a hardscrabble existence on the “Island” (loosely based on Manitoulin), the narrator — an activist named Cassandra — gives a very personal account of the ugly slide of collapse. It’s not often you see the future rendered in such earthy detail, even in dystopic SF, and it’s a bit depressing to think that this may be one of the more realistic recent imaginings of the shape of things to come.

Evening’s Empires

By Paul McAuley

(Gollancz, 374 pages, $34.99)

Award-winning British SF author Paul McAuley is usually described as a “hard SF” man, which is a fair label as far as it goes but doesn’t address his interest in how science is embedded in a culture, and its relation to primitivism and religion. In Evening’s Empires (the latest in his Quiet War series, though it can be enjoyed on its own) he tells of how, after an attack by pirates, the scion of a family of deep space junkmen inherits the head (now detached) of a brilliant philosopher who had been investigating a quasi-mystical Singularity known as the Bright Moment.

Before you can say “Bring me the head of Dr. Gagarian!” it seems as though everyone is out to get their hands on the philosopher’s cryopacked noggin, making young Hari Pilot into both the hunter and the hunted in a worldlet- and planet-skipping adventure where the best advice he gets is to trust no one. Not even himself.

Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction

Ed. by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

(Exile Editions, $19.95, 335 pages)

Unless you’ve been living off the grid for the last decade — which wouldn’t be bad training for a zombie apocalypse, by the way — the living dead have pretty much completely taken over popular culture: from books to films to cable TV series, they’ve been popping up everywhere from Japan to Cuba. Canada too? Of course!

In fact, Dead North suggests, zombies may be thought of as native to this country, their presence going back to Aboriginal myths and legends. In this new anthology of mostly original short stories we see deadheads, shamblers, jiang shi, and Shark Throats invading such home and native settings as the Bay of Fundy’s Hopewell Rocks, Alberta’s tar sands, Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and a Vancouver Island grow-op. Throw in the last poutine truck on Earth driving across Saskatchewan and some “mutant demon zombie cows devouring Montreal” (honest!) and what you’ve got is a fun and eclectic mix of zombie fiction, with a special interest in environmental issues and the sometimes thin line that separates the quick and the dead.

The Adjacent

By Christopher Priest

(Gollancz, 419 pages, $34.99)

There’s something comforting in the “many worlds” thesis that says we only occupy one among an infinite number of alternate realities. If we really mess up, or even get killed, we might still be doing great in the universe next door.

Veteran speculative author Christopher Priest (who wrote the novel The Prestige that was made into the Christopher Nolan movie) gives this idea a surprisingly fresh and subtle interpretation in The Adjacent, a combination Slaughterhouse Five and Cloud Atlas that stands as a love letter to England, magic, the Royal Air Force, and finally love itself. When photographer Tibor Tarent, citizen of a future Islamic Republic of Great Britain, loses his wife in a terrorist bombing (or does he?) he finds himself at the intersection of a series of adjacent worlds connected by a strange quantum device. Whimsical and compelling, this is a moving meditation on life’s contingencies, and all those might-have-beens that, at least in some possible sequence of events, actually were.

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